Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 9781503619043

Citation preview

Dancing Machines

Dancing Machines CHOREOGRAPHIES OF THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

FELICIA MCCARREN

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2003

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America, on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarren, Felicia M. Dancing machines: choreographies of the age of mechanical reproduction I Felicia McCarren. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN o-8047-3988-9 (cloth: alk. paper)ISBN o-8047-3997-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) r. Modern dance. 2. Mechanization in dance. 3· Machinery. I. Title. GV1783 .M25 2003 792.8-dC2I 20020I566r Original Printing 2003 Typeset by Heather Boone in ro/q Sa bon.

Contents

Acknowledgments

I.

Introduction

I

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

9

Mechanics: The Human Machine Thermodynamics: The Human Motor Cinematics Choreographies Techne and Poesis: Hybrids 2.

Choreocinema

The Dancer, the Train, and the Cinema Edison Operates Dancers Transitions From Dance Spectator to Cinema Spectator "Loie Fuller" Dances for Lumiere; Anabel/a Dances for Edison 3·

Vll

Abstraction

Isadora's Motor Power Mechanical Grotesques The Dancer Disappears in a Station of the Metro Dance of the Intellect Modern Dance and Modernist Abstraction Isadora Dances for Gertrude Stein The Symbols and Not the Real Thing Isadora Dances for Marinetti

I2 IS 2I 3I 38 43

43 45 53

s8 63 65 67 72 76

8o 82 86 92

96

VI

Contents

4·

Ballets Without Bodies The Futurist Dancer versus the Dancer of the Future The Dancer Becomes a (War) Machine The Ballets Russes: Puppets and Savages The Ballets Suedois: A Critique of the Snapshot; an Homage to Cinema Instantist Ballet Mechanical Ballet Jean Borlin Dances for Blaise Cendrars

5·

Labor Is Dancing Taylorism: Speed and Natural Ability Swinging in Cities Michio Ito Dances for Yeats Labor Is Dancing The Chorus Line Ornament of Duration Alienation

6.

Submitting to the Machine Primitivism Josephine Baker's Use Value Possession Cinematic Techno- Transcendence Fixity Josephine Baker Dances for Posterity

99 99 IOJ I08

II2 II8 I22 126 129 129 IJJ 137 IJ8 142 146 IJI 159 163 I68 174 179 I88 190

Conclusion

193

Notes Bibliography Index

201 241 249

Acknowledgments

For invitations to teach or speak about my work, I am grateful to JeanMichel Rabate, Peggy Phelan, Barbara Browning, Ruth Tsoffar, Constance Sherak, Pamela Cheek, and Cristina Caprioli. Thanks also to the colleagues and students who have made the lonely work of scholarship rewarding, and to the camaraderie of friends and neighbors during the writing and rewriting of this book in New York, New Orleans, and Paris. All of those thanked in my first book should consider themselves thanked again here, but in particular I thank Michel Serres, Tomiko Yoda, Hasok Chang, and Felipe Smith, and, for their comments on the manuscript, Michele Pridmore-Brown, Ramsay Burt, and Nell Andrew. This project could not have come to fruition without the support of Helen Tartar at Stanford University Press, Hope Glidden, chair of the department of French and Italian at Tulane University, Teresa S. Soufas, dean of the Tulane Faculty of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Valerie Greenberg, former dean of Newcomb College. This volume is dedicated to the women who gave me their keys during the years of nomadism: Claire, Cheryl, Pam, Maddi, Connie, Ruth, Mimi, and Jef; and to my beloved nomads, Ali and Adil.

Dancing Machines

Introduction

Asserting the importance of dance-particularly ballet-in the United States in I972, George Balanchine complained that "Europeans think we only make machines and automobiles." 1 Because Balanchine's dances for Bertolt Brecht's I 9 3 3 ballet chante, The Seven Deadly Sins, had staged exactly that idea-an American dancer must herself become a dancing (and money-making) machine in order for her greedy family to fully realize their capitalist dreams-the statement signals the choreographer's shift of perspective along with his citizenship. Beyond the supposed incompatibility between technological superiority and high culture that Balanchine is trying to refute, the remark also serves as a reminder of an age in which dance vied with automobiles and machines for global attention, and rivaled them in importance. Balanchine's easy slide from ballet to machines reads as a vestige of the thinking of the early-twentieth-century European avant-garde that is the subject of this book. Balanchine's statement also reveals a continuum in the thinking that has connected dancers to technology across the century and around the globe. The July 2000 Stagebill for dance events at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City featured an advertisement by a "Lead Sponsor," an automobile manufacturer, under the caption "the relentless pursuit of I

2

Introduction

perfection" and above a sales pitch proclaiming the "extraordinary performances" of their cars, with two mechanical models of dancers in ballet costumes and poses, with ball bearings and other movable machine parts connecting their molded limbs. The advertisement reenacts links between dancers and sports cars made almost a century earlier by F. T. E. Marinetti's techno-fantasy Futurist choreographies and reminds us that the image of the dancing machine is two-sided: on the one hand, dancers embody the natural force that technology harnesses; on the other, the dancing body represents the structure that captures and translates that force. This double resonance of machines-active and passive, natural and artificial-resounds in words such as "motor" on the one hand and "mechanization" on the other. Modernity rides the rails of two different kinds of movement: the shock that Walter Benjamin identified in nineteenth-century responses such as Poe's and Baudelaire's to mechanization, and the smoothness that machines have promised if not always produced. In the literature, paintings, and press of nineteenth-century Paris, the creature most often compared with the ballerina was the racehorse; like racehorses, ballerinas were animal machines-fleet, swift, smooth. In the twentieth century, dancers became auto-mobiles: driven, motorized, mechanized. In the transition to a highly technologized world, dancers continued to be compared with finely tuned machines. Isadora Duncan, whose carriage was unhorsed and drawn by German students after an early triumph, an honor that had been conferred on nineteenth-century divas, became a twentieth-century icon, one of the first who moved with and died in the automobile. Half a century later, Mikhail Baryshnikov, after immigrating to the United States in the mid-r970s from the Kirov Ballet, described learning how to dance like a "sports car" in Twyla Tharp's Push Comes to Shove. The automobile that is imagined dancing and the dancer imagining himself as an automobile represent the hybrid beings that this book refers to as "dancing machines." Although they suggest that there has been little progress in the public image of dancers, these examples reveal that what has changed is the importance of dance in a culture that has ceded its place to technology. Instead of driving dancers in homage to their art, today's dance public, attending the kind of dance events staged at Lincoln Center, is prompted to imagine dancers as instruments of luxury, the next best thing to a Lexus.

Introduction

3

What is a dancing machine? The Jackson Five's 196os hit, which my title will recall to most American readers of a certain age, suggests two interlocked and inverse images: a stylized robotics and an unstoppable energy. In fact, this book argues, earlier versions of this two-edged image can be found in Europe a half century earlier, in the importation of American ideas, in the art of Americans in exile there, and in dance forms that both incorporated and resisted American, African, and Asian influences. The "dancing machine" elaborated in the first decades of the twentieth century engages two very different kinds of energy, or styles of dance: the first, dancing that looks mechanical, like machines; and the second, dancing that works like a machine, producing the image of a force of nature, a superhuman functioning. This book will disappoint readers who come to it looking for a catalogue of the first image only: the many forms of machine dancing that flourished across the twentieth century and that played with mechanics, from constructivism to contemporary performance art, from the cakewalk to hip-hop. Many of the key figures and texts from this already welldocumented history, including theories of acting and emotion, and mechanical performances, including puppetry and pantomime, cabaret and cinema, are only briefly mentioned here. Instead, this history is complicated by the inclusion of models of the second kind of energy produced by a "dancing machine": an indefatigable perpetuum mobile, a dancing that emulates machine logic rather than machinelike movement. Under this heading, readers familiar with dance history will find in these pages modern dancers they would never have associated with machines. Thus, even dancing inspired by images from ancient or so-called primitive art-for example, that of Isadora Duncan or Josephine Baker--engaged with contemporary thought about machines in ways that they might have denied, even while their performances responded to the culture of the machine. The dancing machines considered in this book represent a range of responses to machine culture, starting with real dancers whose discipline in performance serves to illustrate, metaphorically, the work of the motor or the mechanics of the automaton. Dancers' training makes their bodies extra-human, capable of physical feats beyond the range of normal human movement. Like athletes, dancers push physical limits but also style the body itself by developing certain muscle groups rather than others to create a particular look or line. And like athletes, dancers are often read

4

Introduction

as moving unconsciously, or naturally, with a kind of animal speed or grace-as if their movement were driven by instinct. Their use of movement for expression connects dancers to the realms of the pre-linguistic or pre-technological, the animal or the "primitive" that is the obverse, but not the opposite, of the machine. Dancers have represented both the capabilities of a highly mechanized body and the pre-technological body whose powerful naturalness is imitated by machinery. After 1900, a new hybrid of the dancing machine developed in theater, poetry, technology, and industry-in the machine dances of the new ballet companies, the mechanical ballets of avant-garde cinema, the real and imagined motorization of dancers and carriages, the jolting puppetry of the assembly line, the marionette-like or military cadence of the chorus line. Along with recent critical reevaluations of the early-twentiethcentury avant-garde, this book attempts to reconcile two narratives of the development of new dance forms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One narrative-applied especially to American modern dancehas held to the modernist rhetoric and reception of dance as natural, unconnected to the theories and practices of the machine age and the socalled machine ballets of the historical European avant-garde. Yet although there was a strong current of resistance, especially in American modern dance of the r 9 3 os, to machine and cinema culture, and this resistance has been one of the enduring images of modern dance, it is possible to see, before this, dance helping to shape the very machine culture to which it would eventually cede its central place, pushed onto the "entertainment" side of a Taylorist-Fordist work-entertainment divide. 2 Although some modern dance responded to machine culture in parodic critique or aesthetic detachment, the freedom of movement that dance represents (with or against machines)-its very energy and "naturalness"-was coopted by machine theory and constructed by mass media and markets. The rhetoric of the machine elaborated the ease, or freedom, that dancing manifested. More than a paradox, the dancing machine is a vestige of the era of dance's centrality and a sign of its co-optation, an image of the tyranny of industry disguised by technophilia. Dancing Machines goes back to the waning moments of concert dance's cultural centrality in Europe to explore how industrial, mechanized modernity created the fantasy of the dancing machine, even while sidelining dancing as diversion.

Introduction

5

Although recent work on the European avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century has focused increasing attention on the political consequences of their technological fantasies, the grave realizations of science fiction in war and other technologies, a history of dance that moves into this territory may seem to readers to miss much of what is beautiful and liberating in modern dance. But the pleasure taken in the traces that remain of this dancing-texts, pictures, films-needs to be understood in the context of the production of these dances within and against the artistic, social, and scientific thinking of its historical context. Modern dance promoted the idea that the body can move in new ways and speak new languages that are no longer submitted to a system of interpretation in which movements, I have argued, were pathologized. Modern dance in line with Isadora Duncan announced itself as liberatory and humanistic, suggesting that it staged a certain freedom of expression and mobility of identity, a redefinition of bodily subjectivity. Yet twentiethcentury dance--especially African American dance-was often pathologized by mainstream white culture, even though it staged bodies liberated not only by changing cultural and interpretive codes but also by technologies freeing us into speed and space. As Hillel Schwartz has argued in the case of torque, technological developments were paralleled in dance techniques. 3 At the same time, modern dances-with a critical distance-has represented our enslavement to technologies, our imprisonment within bodies whose capacities are limited, the mechanization of bodily will, the burden of the malfunctioning machine, the madness of technophilia. Although cultural changes surrounding its creation in part released dance from its long-standing interpretive association with illnesses mental and physical, in the twentieth century the interpretive grid not of medicine but of modern industry pushed dance toward the margins even as the form maintained great popularity. Because dance performance is physical labor, it glorifies the human body's capacities even as it belittles industry's manpower. Arguably important to a cultural reconception of gesture and rhythm in labor, dance offers ways of thinking both about the movement possible with machines and about machines moving themselves. Yet dance would nevertheless be sidelined in the modernity produced by movement physiology, work science, and scientific management. My earlier study of dance's pathologization in the context of the rise of

6

Introduction

scientific medicine centered on excessivity, the excess of gesture that is symptom. Dancing Machines treats "economy of gesture": scientific management's minimum gesture; industry's disciplined, fragmented, interrupted gesture; cinema's serial gesture; techno-theory's coded, cosmic, gesture. The story here is not one of healthy, expressive movement being pathologized but the reverse, as dysfunctional movements (the shock, the tic) are registered under the rubric of ultimate productivity. The discourse of efficiency in work production might be read along with the study of effort in work such as that of Rudolf von Laban on transforming energy into effort. Instead, in chapter 5, for example, I focus on texts that treat dance in hauntingly Tayloresque terms of efficiency and productivity even while theorizing dance's poetic antiproductivity. This book attempts to take the choreographies of the machine age on their own terms while also exploring their historical contexts, to consider not only choreographic intentions but also choreographic effects: dance as a nexus of ideas, inspiring and inspired. This work depends on the assumption of a cultural sphere much broader than one defined by dance alone, and when using the term "choreography" I am referring to the writing of dance as well as its dancing, to its imagination in many media as well as its real reception. Rather than surveying the dance of the period, I follow a network of exchanges between historical dance performances, modernist texts of all kinds, and technological thinking and practice from the late nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth, to consider encounters between dancers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, writers, and physiologists as representative of a larger culture of movement and movement analysis. In these pages, canonical figures from what is now called high modernism-figures whom we would not normally associate with dance, such as Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein-turn out not only to be seeing but also thinking about dance, and even, surprisingly, rethinking their own work in terms of dance. And writers who seem to have little in common-for example, William Butler Yeats and Siegfried Kracauer-turn out to be thinking about dance in similar ways. Very different kinds of dancingsuch as Isadora Duncan's and Josephine Baker's-are co-opted by modernism and sometimes described in strangely similar terms. Yet dancers

Introduction

7

get written out of the cultural history they themselves were writing, and that was written around them, in part because they are not principally writers. This book tries to integrate the wide range of "texts" they left with the broader textual heritage of writing about them. Although the writers and dancers considered here are canonical-the ones whom historical accounts and images of the period have preservedbringing them into dialogue means reconsidering their mutual influences and giving to dance a greater place in the mix. To look only at the stage would mean missing much of dance's inner qualities, qualities that often are the most influential on thinking in other domains. A little poem by Pound, as insignificant as the suicidal dancer it describes, can become part of the magisterial oeuvre of literary history; the dancer remains obscure. My aim here is to reintroduce, into the texts of modernism, the living presence of dancers or, as Ramsay Burt has written, "bring dancing bodies back into the discussion"-of twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history both inspired by and inspiring dance. By reconsidering modernism's focus on the dancers of its time, this book addresses what Amy Koritz has called the "intellectual and institutional marginalization of dance" while exploring the greater trend toward sidelining of dance in an increasingly technologized culture. 4 While trying to gauge dance's progressive marginalization in the twentieth century (dance is no longer front-page news as it was in nineteenthcentury Paris), I am simultaneously inserting dance into its deserved place in the history of ideas, taking dance on its own terms, as an art form expressive of cultural concerns and inventiveness on a grand scale, even while not considering it only as "grand" or "great" art produced by gifted geniuses. Attempting to understand both what is fascinating in dance and what culture projects onto it, this book assigns to dance a more important place in mainstream European modernisms and machine culture than it is usually given, and considers modernism-in-the-making as well as its masterful performances. A third machine, whose significance for the understanding of twentiethcentury dance is here reconsidered, is embedded in the image of the dancing machine: the motion picture camera that captures and diffuses choreography while remaining outside it. If my title reminds readers of Motown,

8

Introduction

my subtitle points earlier, to Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The chapters of this book take as their terrain the years between the imagining of the cinematograph and Benjamin's landmark essay focusing on its effects, attempting to locate the image of a dancing machine around the invention of a mechanical reproducibility that changed perception and gesture, the aura and status of the work of art, driven by "the desire of contemporary masses to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly." 5 With the patenting of mechanical reproducibility in the movie camera in r895, several different kinds of concert dancing also take recognizable shape. This book begins slightly earlier, proposing an exploration of modern dance forms in the context of the developing practices of "mechanical reproduction" not simply because they have, ultimately, won out, but also because the very conception of modern dance's "liveness" and presence was constructed in the face of the mechanization of bodies in industry and the invention of recording devices that widened its audiences. Not a history of dance and film, nor of dance on film, this is a history of the modernist idea of economies of gesture taking shape across domains surrounding dance: derived from physiology; applied in work science or scientific management's economy of effort; imaged via photography or chronophotography; expressed in poetics through the pictogram, code, or seriality; expressed in painting as abstraction, fragmentation, or fusion of forms. Although the camera would take over and make mechanical many of choreography's experimental discoveries, it would keep a certain kind of dance before the public, manipulated and eventually marginalized. Much of the concert dance of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe has workingclass, labor ambitions, yet ultimately the machine that would bring dance to the masses-showing them what they would no longer have gone to see live on stage, assuring dance a wider audience and longer life-is also the machine that would kill it.

1.

Economies of Gesture MECHANICS, THERMODYNAMICS, CINEMATICS

Our age of high tech is haunted by the persistence of an image from the last century: the dancing machine, paradox of the ease of mechanization and its tortures, image of fusion and fragmentation, of diversion and work. The dancing machine represents both an idealization of the body's performative prowess and a critique of its mechanization, the coordinated precision of rhythmic ensembles and the fragmented but functional isolated gesture of industrial production. It poses the questions of workers' enslavement to technology, or the autonomy and freedom of movement it can bring. In science, art, and industry, on stage and screen, the dancing machine manifests a critique of mechanization or its idealization, the staccato movement of bodies with machines or the stylization of their hybrid potential. Dance-and especially modern dance-is usually the site for discussion of the "aura" that, as Walter Benjamin famously argued, withers in the age of mechanical reproduction. From what sources, then, comes this image of the dancing machine that dominated early-twentieth-century avant-garde art and choreography, cinema, design, and industry? Its persistence and its triumphs suggest that it is more than a nightmare of

9

10

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

modernity. The twentieth century's precision chorus line, cinematic ballets mecaniques, or machine ballets are anticipated in many earlier dance forms, even in the tulle-skirted corps de ballet of the romantic ballet. In Baudelaire's image of the sylph sliding away backstage, Benjamin finds an emblem of "aura" vanishing into modernity. There is already a haunting premonition of the culture of mechanical reproduction in the army of sylphs the ballet supplies to back her up. In spite of her aura of ephemerality, the romantic ballerina is the harbinger of a culture of mechanical reproduction that will crush her. From the period of what has come to be called modernism, this book gathers material across a spectrum of arts and industry: the instant photograph serialized in chronophotography or projected in cinema; the condensed ideogram or vortex of modernist poetics, described by Pound as a dance; the prose of iteration with slight variation, used to describe dances and described by Stein as cinematic; the mixing of technological reality and fantasy in concert dance for which Apollinaire used the term "surreal"; the fragmentation of the object in painting and film in what Leger called mechanical "equivalences"; the minimum gesture of Taylorist work-science; the rhythm of this choreographed labor, cubist abstraction, and cinematic projection; the anatomic anonymity of the assembly line and the chorus drill, the erasure or stereotyping of identity in the automata of machine ballets; the "hieroglyphs" of cinema, Asian, or African dance; the Brechtian gestus; the "resonance" of the photographic or the cinematographic image. Dancing Machines provides a ground for asking what connects these forms across many domains: the possibility of the freezing or fragmentation of the image in instantaneity or timemotion studies; the possibility of its condensation-photographic, mechanical, or theatrical-in gesture, in pictographic ideogram or prose; the possibility of its projection-in rhythmic seriality, in chorus line or cinema; and the "best speed" for choreographed labor or cinematic projection. What connects these forms, from work-science to dance, is a common culture, from physiological movement studies to cinema, and a common idea-economy of gesture. Across these forms, modernist economy of gesture takes two quite different shapes: one is a minimum effort, gauged

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

I I

to fit the machine; the other, a mechanical that is cosmic rather than comical, an oikos or system expansive rather than reductive. Explorations of the different forms that economy of gesture takes in modernism reveal that it is not only a movement quality connected to machines but also a way of perceiving movement produced by machines. Born from physiology, imaged via chronophotography and elaborated in cinematography, the minimum gesture developed in nineteenth-century work-science became central to the aesthetics of a range of avant-garde modernisms. Representing efficiency and minimum effort in the realm of physiology, representing the speed or rhythm of modernity in poetics, photography, or performance, economy of gesture can be understood as fragmented or condensed, reductive or repetitive, partial or essential. In choreographies of the machine age, the minimum gesture can signal the mechanical operation of the monster machine that drives it, the automatic gesture that flips the switch on. It can also embody the cosmic energy of that machine condensed into a single body, the "human motor" powering the universe with a single pair of arms and legs. This second form of machine implies a very different meaning of "economy" of gesture: not minimized movement but movement defining and powering the universe. Two different economies of gesture, identifiable in the art and thought of modernism, are generated from two historical models of the machine. Economy of gesture has one source in mechanics, the gesture that hides the work or agency behind it. It has a second source in thermodynamics and the redefinition of labor around it. Whereas medicine and workscience contain or reduce the gesture to the minimum, isolating the smallest muscle first in the service of ergonomic safety but eventually for maximum productivity, such gesture takes on a poetic, pictographic, or even spiritual cast in some modernist writing and dancing. This book charts two simultaneous histories: one recounting the stripping down of gesture and bodies to machine aesthetics and the minimum gesture, from Mareyism to Taylorism; the other recounting the fleshing out of machines with bodies, reconnecting technology to its mythic, ritual, or religious functions. Dancing, in modernism, lends itself to both stories and both movement styles, one explanation of why it remains a persistent image formachines despite its obvious humanity.

I 2

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

MECHANICS: THE HUMAN MACHINE

Michel Serres has historicized these two conceptions of machines-the automaton and the motor-and their relations both to bodies and to the cosmos by locating them in the context of the sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Automata were imagined functioning in a Newtonian universe of multiple and disparate motivating forces, controlled by a force outside them, and functioning at external demand. 1 The science and fiction linking dancers and machines are as old and varied as these conceptions of machines themselves. In scientific traditions, in the literary imagination, and in stage representations, our technologies have often been anthropomorphized by dancers who appear to be simultaneously superhuman in their feats of flexibility and endurance, and subhuman in their wordless physicality. Between machines' not-quitehuman functioning and humans' not-quite-machine-like performance, choreographers, philosophers, writers, filmmakers, and artists have situated dancers. Twentieth-century machine ballets followed a theater tradition in which dancers performed contemporary conceptions of machinery and thus commented on them: from baroque ballets staging Cartesian thinking about mind and body, body and cosmos, through the nineteenth-century ballets staging automata, either machines that emulated humans-such as the lifesize doll Coppelia-or humans transformed into machines-such as the Nutcracker.Z In these and other ballets, a central figure is the magician or man of science who drives the story: the wily craftsman who cobbles together Coppdia, or the mysterious Drosselmeyer who somehow controls the Nutcracker's transformation, or the maestro of Petrouchka who pulls the puppet's strings. One type of "human machine," the automaton or robot, has often been imagined as a mechanized mover, a dancer. Writing about Babbage's Difference Engine-a calculator now seen as an early ancestor of the computer, designed in the r82os, built in part in the r83os and r84os, andreconstructed in the 1990s-Jenny Uglow describes it as slipping "from the realm of engineering and calculation into the numbered rhythms of dance, the abstraction of mobile sculpture." 3 But Babbage's machine is not only describable, metaphorically, as a dancer; his machine was inspired by automata with an even closer connection to dancers.

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

I

3

Babbage's greatest interest was in re-creating the human mind in a machine, and for this project he drew inspiration from the contemporary performance art of automata. In "Babbage's Dancer and the Impresarios of Mechanism," Simon Schaffer analyzes the "neat connection between passion, exoticism, mechanism and money" in the London showrooms in which mechanized automata were displayed. 4 Often created for the European courts or for aficionados in Asian markets (East India Company's China trade), some of these machines figured "Oriental" types such as the famous chess-playing Automatic Turk (built for Maria Teresa at the end of the I76os by Wolfgang Von Kempelen), and often they figured dancers, for example, an automatic rope dancer displayed in 1818 London, whose movements were described on the exhibition poster as "scarcely to be distinguished from those of a living performer; it sits perfectly free on the rope, and moves with the utmost correctness without any apparent Machinery." 5 One such figure, designed by John Merlin, was viewed by a young Babbage in Merlin's London Mechanical Museum around I 8oo; Babbage described her as "an admirable danseuse . ... The lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible."6 Schaffer connects this twelve-inch-tall silver dancer, eventually owned by Babbage, to his great calculating Difference Engine, next to which she was displayed at his home. Although Babbage "worked hard to make, then exploit this distinction between catchpenny and serious machines, " 7 he had a dress made for the dancer and continued to be fascinated by the human-imitative potential for automata. In particular, he imagined a games machine that he would dress up as well and use to fund his project for an Analytical Engine, an intelligent machine. What made machines intelligent was that "they could foresee, they could remember, and they could switch their behaviour in ways which seemed random but were really determined. " 8 This invention was a hybrid creature, embodying the seduction of a dancer and the determination of a machine. For Schaffer, "Babbage's dancer was never just a gaudy trick. She was rather an alluring emblem of the aestheticized gaze of the impresarios of intelligence." 9 Although the automata were seductive performers, Schaffer argues that their role in the upheavals of the machine age was significant: "theatrical automata really had inspired the Industrial Revolution." 10

I4

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

The tale of the automata and their impresarios confirms that the places whence machines come, where machines are put on show and the places within machine systems where intelligence is supposed to reside raised, and still raise, delicate political and philosophical issues. Most of these problems hinge on the problem of work and its visibility.... This is the point of the tale of the Dancer and the Difference Engine. The intelligence attributed to machines hinges on the cultural invisibility of the human skills which accompany them. 11 Schaffer continues: "If such machines look intelligent because we do not concentrate on where their work is done, then we need to think harder about the work which produces values and who performs it." 12 In the case of "intelligent machines," much of the intelligence resides in the operators and operation of the machine-the specific tasks we ask it to do. 13 In Shaffer's reading of Babbage, the automaton, representing concealed labor and mechanical determination in the shape of aesthetic seduction, challenged the definition and valuation of labor in anticipation of the Industrial Revolution and reflected a disappearing culture, as Georges Vigarello has pointed out in regard to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that was marked by limited gestures rather than motor effects or energies ("effets moteurs et energetiques"). 14 The example of Babbage's Difference Engine reveals that dancers were understood as central to a machine logic and aesthetic well before the twentieth century. Aspects of the automaton's hidden mechanics and its Orientalized or exoticized character are also found in twentieth-century examples considered in this book. Characterized by hidden workings, such mechanical movement-jerky or smooth-provides an apt figure for dancing that conceals its mastery. In a second conception of the machine important for this dance history, the "human motor" focuses on machines' manifest rather than concealed mechanics, and on expenditure of energy rather than external control. Whereas the automata hides its work and agency in an exercise of inanimate animation, the human motor openly exhibits both, manifesting a different facet of the energy available to industry and a different form of economy of gesture.

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

r5

THERMODYNAMICS: THE HUMAN MOTOR

Although ballets such as Coppelia and The Nutcracker staged the link between dancing and the automaton, it is also evident in what might be called the science fiction texts of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's Future Eve and F. T. E. Marinetti's Futurism, which are considered in following chapters. Against this misogynist image of the female dancer as a kind of robot, linked to disease or destruction, Isadora Duncan announced her own modern "dancer of the future" in the terms of thermodynamics. In the course of the nineteenth century, machines were reconceived as motor forces linked to thermodynamics and ruled by internal, dynamic principles. 15 Whereas the mechanical automata gave a face to the problems of human agency, the power of mind over body, concealed work, and the mystery of the "automatic," the motor concretized the problem of perpetual movement. The concept of the motor has a rich history of associations: first, as the prime motor (or mover) of Aristotelian metaphysics and subsequent medieval cosmologies, or its substitute-the agent or force producing mechanical motion. As a term in anatomy, the muscle or nerve that promotes movement, "motor" has another history, registered, among others, by Descartes in his physiological treatise Sur l'homme, which interprets the physiology of matter in motion. 16 The use of the term for a host of machines, ultimately including the motorcar, the self-propelling "auto-mobile," follows after these philosophical and physiological acceptations. Already in the use of the word "motor" across these domains, to describe the movement of things and people, cosmos and limbs, can be seen the interlocking conceptions of human and machine; its continued use in medicine (motor reflexes, motor nerves) marks the extended analogies between machine and human movement. Taking his title from a 1914 treatise on human mechanics by Jules Amar, Anson Rabinbach in The Human Motor traces turn-of-the-century work-science to the nineteenth-century thermodynamic conception of "kraft" or universal energy, as applied to humans and their labor in the work of Helmholtz and Marx. 17 After Descartes's and La Mettrie's treatises on the human machine, scientific materialism produced a different idea of the relation between the human and the mechanical, imagining the body as working machine. Rabinbach summarizes: the automaton,

r6

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

ruled by external force, followed a biomechanical model; the perpetuum mobile was imagined as a human motor in which the life force is linked to the force of nature. Following from the laws of thermodynamics-the conservation of energy (credited to Helmholtz, 1847), and the inevitable dissipation of force and loss of heat characterized by entropy (credited to Clausius, 185os)the motor was conceived as harnessing natural force and was understood both in nonhuman (artificial--or natural) and human terms. Eventually, the body too would be imagined as a machine and analogized as a motor also harnessing such force and using it in labor. Significantly, Helmholtz applied the character of an energy-converting machine to the body, rather than reducing the human to the machine; in Rabinbach's summary, "the metaphor of the machine rather than the machine itself-the automatais anthropomorphized. " 18 Drawing on the French engineering tradition that referred to travail or puissance du travail (work power) as a measure for the energy yield of machines in the 183os, Helmholtz used the term Arbeitskraft to describe work identical to expenditure of force: the body is a thermodynamic machine, and work could be the product of man, nature, or the machine. 19 Amar's Le Moteur humain et les bases scientifiques du travail professionel suggests the confusion of human and machine in work-science, elaborating parallels between human and machine that proceed from mechanics of the machine humaine to the interaction of bone and muscle with metal.2° In a preface to the second edition (1923), Henri Le Chatelier says Amar applies "mecanique rationelle" to "human limbs, that is to say, to the different mechanical parts of the machine. " 21 On the other hand, Le Chatelier relates that workers are aghast when treated like machines, for example, in experiments with chronometrage. 22 But he also acknowledges that machines have often been treated better and that it is impossible to refuse humans the care that the steam engine has long received. 23 The worker may be viewed as superior to the machine in some cases but always risks losing humanity in the comparison. In a passage at the end of Le Moteur humain on the subject of production, Amar details the superiority of humans to machines made possible by a longer work life, greater flexibility, and adaptability. The upkeep of the human machine must be "the constant preoccupation of industry leaders, officers in charge of

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

17

troops, colonials exploiting the considerable energy of thousands of indigenous laborers, of all those who pursue the valorization of human work in the best possible conditions. Because the upkeep of the living machine is not less delicate than that of everyday motors. " 24 For Le Chatelier, Amar's work addresses two reciprocal problems: how to maintain a level of production while keeping fatigue at a minimum and how to maintain a stable level of fatigue while arriving at maximum production/5 Amar's text describes an "art of work" that is "firmly established on scientific bases. " 26 The opening page of Le Moteur humain is peppered with terms from mechanics that describe the range of scientific study of the art of moving: from machine to mecanique, from bodies in movement to cinematique ("science du mouvement") and dynamique ("science des forces"). The scientific goal is to "proportion work," ("proportionner le travail"); quoting from his 1910 work Le Rendement de La machine humaine, Amar notes that science helps humans economize effort, recharge, and adapt better than any machineY In Rabinbach's history, the metaphor of the human motor inspires in the European work-science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the development of techniques to harmonize the movements of the body with those of the industrial machine and then to measure the expenditure of mental and physical energy. 28 As the scientific term puissance-power or force (referred to, for example, in Sadi Carnot's 1824 Reflections sur La puissance motrice du feu)-becomes associated with the force or energy mobilized in labor power, it intersects with the term "performance," used in engineering and mechanics to describe technology. With a different resonance, and a different history, from puissance, the idea of "performance" as measurable productivity becomes important in European work-science late in the nineteenth century and in theories of productivism inspired by the application of thermodynamics to working bodies. The redefinition of "performance" as productivity brought with it questions of rhythm and movement that would be studied by ergography and ergonomics, with an intense focus on the use of the muscles for the purpose of identifying a minimum gesture. Rabinbach sees the early practice of work-science as well-intentioned: for Emil Kraepelin, for example,

I

8

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

"industrial work was based on adjusting minute physiological and psychic processes to the rhythms of the machine. " 29 Kraepelin, working with Hugo Munsterberg, the pioneer of psychotechnics, in Berlin and at Harvard University, compared the "rhythmically structured" work of past epochs with the rigid economy of force imposed on the body by machinery. Influenced by Bucher's ethnological work on the rhythms of primitive work habits, they saw an intimate connection between the development of modern technology and the "unnatural" character of modern work processes .... Mechanized work, they observed, reduced physical effort to those muscles directly engaged in the actual process, eliminating all superfluous motion. Whereas the French physiologists tended to focus on single tasks such as vine cutting, hammering, or filing, Kraepelin was concerned with a uniquely physiological phenomenon, which he called "the principle of the smallest muscle. " 30 The principle of the smallest muscle would have tremendous resonance beyond physiology, and its exploration was far from an exercise in the scientific "impartiality" Amar invokes in his introduction. Alongside the abstraction of the effort of working bodies, the bodies themselves lose their identity in the work-science some have argued set out to help them. Although it would later be employed in the service of maximum productivity, this work-science, for Rabinbach, attempted to address the psychophysics of fatigue and muscle fatigue by understanding ways in which industrialization, requiring ever more precise tasks, demanded smaller movements. This displacement of work performance from muscles demanding greater expenditures of energy to those demanding less prompted ergonomists to create exercises to train muscles to more efficiently deploy the energy that machines required.Jl Rabinbach summarizes: "Science constructed a model of work and the working body as pure performance, as an economy of energy, and even as a pathology of work." 32 These smaller gestures, at first elegantly designed as part of what Etienne-Jules Marey called "greater economy from training," 33 would come to constitute the pathology of fragmented, repetitive work, as Taylorist Scientific Management, present in Europe before

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

19

but more prevalent after the First World War, countered workers' resistance to machines and assured that maximum speed and productivity would not reduce the labor force in any sense. 34 The redefinition and abstraction of labor in terms of energy, movement, muscle, and rhythm, in the application of thermodynamics to working bodies, reveals the profound sociocultural implications of work-science and suggests a common culture linking dance to the machine. Considering this history, Isabelle Stengers describes the age of the motor and the human motor in terms of the questions of reversibility and irreversibility central to thermodynamics and the broader reconceptions of force, and eventually human labor, organized around it. For Stengers, "the problem at the start of thermodynamics was to employ heat to make a motor work," but its starting point, Fourier's (mathematical) formulation of the law of heat diffusion, described "an irremediable waste," the spontaneous and irreversible diffusion of heat. The nineteenth-century imagination, "being at the same time haunted by the depletion of resources and carried away by the perspectives of revolution and progress, could not ignore reversibility." 35 These fears, as well as the "leveling of productive differences," determined the original interpretation of the second principle of thermodynamics: "Thermodynamics is thus set up in relation with irreversibility but also against it, seeking not to know it but to avoid it. And Clausius' entropy would first describe the perfectly controlled, totally reversible conversions of calorific and mechanical energies." But Stengers points out that "physics recognized that dynamics-which describes nature as obedient and controllable in its being--{)nly corresponds to a particular case. In thermodynamics, the controllable character is not natural but the product of artifice; the tendency to escape from domination manifests the intrinsic activity of nature." 36 Stengers points out the profound social and cultural consequences of the application of ideas from thermodynamics to questions of labor and laboring bodies: "The refusal to restrict thermodynamics to systems artificially cut off from the world was produced by the desire to approach a world peopled by beings capable of evolving and innovating, of beings whose behavior we cannot render foreseeable and controllable except through enslaving them." 37 Taking shape as the exploitation of labor, a

20

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

control over workers reduced to automata, such "enslavement" follows work-science's focus on the most efficient gesture, and scientific management's institutionalization of such gestures, with enforced rhythms of production, creating harmful results. The minimum gesture, aestheticized in modernist media, is also the iterated gesture of the assembly line, generating a pathology of work and a resistance to machines that Taylorism would try to combat. The energy of laboring bodies, including those of colonized or immigrant populations, produced work appropriated by management. In both cases, in Rabinbach's words, "the human organism was considered a productive machine, stripped of all social and cultural relations and reduced to 'performance,' which could be measured in terms of energy and output." 38 Kraeplin's and Amar's work on effort and fatigue was resonant with cultural and ethnic implications-and explicit, negative stereotypes-of work practices of a subject pool, including, in Amar's case, North African workers. 39 This stripping work down to the minimum gesture and pumping workers up to maximum productivity are represented in the dancing of the early twentieth century, taking shape as a minimalist machine aesthetic or a parody of mechanistic madness. The gesture reduced by work-science to the smallest muscle, the "best speed," the maximum efficiency, has tremendous resonance in the dance and theater of its time, in the cinema that arises contemporary with it, and in the poetry and pictures that encode it. At the same time, dancing staged resistance to such modernization, erasure, and exploitation of individual bodies and insisted on the reality of real bodies giving in to time, weight, and the loss of energy. The dancing of Isadora Duncan or Josephine Baker, studied here, suggests not the smallest gesture but the cosmic energy that Isadora called, in Helmoltzian terms, "motor power" or that Michel Leiris identified in Josephine Baker as an icon for an age in thrall to the machine. Yet even dancing like Duncan'sas Andre Levinson said-{:ould show the ravages of time, 40 and Baker's eternally energetic stomping and swinging also marks the human limit, the irreversibility of time. A third kind of machine, the cinematograph, patented during the early years of "modern" dance, avoided by Isadora and courted by Josephine, would seem to return to dance its mechanical, timetranscending, perpetual movement while promising to safeguard the antimechanical naturalness of dancing like theirs.

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

21

CINEMATICS

The revolution in dance that began at the end of the nineteenth century took place at a pivotal moment, between what Martin Jay has called different "scopic regimes. " 41 Jonathan Crary identifies these as the classical order of knowledge in which vision ruled and "regimes of machine vision which take off in the 2oth century." 42 Principal among the new machinic forms of vision was photography, moving from posed long exposures to the "instantaneity" made possible by developing processes that permitted sequential serial chronophotography and then cinematography. Far from a moment of clear division between an old regime and a new one, the moment of the invention of cinema, concurrent with the elaboration of new dance forms, manifests overlapping currents of thinking about movement and its representation in both live performance and recording technology. Dance's prominence in the culture of fin-de-siecle Paris, and its links to both artistic and scientific projects and pictures, tie it closely to early conceptions of cinema. In chapter 2 of this volume, I argue that, before furnishing for cinema visual images with ready-made audience interest and musical-gestural performance apt for the medium's early spectacular capacities, choreography played a role in the scientific-philosophic imagining of, and physiological inspiration for, cinema before its mechanical "invention." Some of cinema's multiple inventors and early experimenters did not imagine it true to movement, and these scientists' and philosophers' hesitations about the camera's ability to render movement closely parallel some modern dancers' concerns about the technology. One of them, Etienne-Jules Marey, is often described as the most important of the inventors because of his efforts to trace serial movement-in particular, in sequential chronophotographs executed in time-motion studies of the analysis of movement. In r873, Marey noted in the opening lines of La Machine animate that differences between the human and the machine had been so reduced that the distinction between them required reconsideration. Living beings have been frequently and in every age compared to machines, but it is only in the present day that the bearing and the justice of this comparison are fully comprehensible.

22

Economies of Gesture: Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Cinematics

No doubt, the physiologists of old discerned levers, pulleys, cordage, pumps, and valves in the animal organism, as in the machine. The working of all this machinery is called Animal Mechanics in a great number of standard treatises. But these passive organs have need of a motor; it is life, it was said, which set all these mechanisms going, and it was believed that thus there was authoritatively established an inviolable barrier between inanimate and animate machines. In our time it is at least necessary to seek another basis for such distinctions, because modern engineers have created machines which are much more legitimately to be compared to animated motors; which, in fact, by means of the little combustible matter which they consume, supply the force requisite to animate a series of organs, and to make them execute the most diverse operations. 43 Seeking to move beyond vitalist explanations that distinguished living beings from machines through the concept of "life," Marey, claims historian of science Fran